Score your own maize phenotypes in our 'Fields of Dreams'!

Annoucment of public grow-outs of the Maize Diversity Project's Nested Association Mapping (NAM) population

"If you build it they will come..."    Well, we have built it:

The ultimate public germplasm resource to date for localizing QTLs in maize!

It is a Nested Association Mapping (NAM) population consisting of 5000 RILs from 25 families, with 200 RILs per family. The families were generated by crossing 25 diverse maize inbred lines with B73 as a common parent.  Additionally, the well-known IBM mapping population is included as the 26^th family.  We have genotyped the entire population of 26 families with 1106 SNP loci (the genotypes and corresponding genetic map are available here).  Extensive Solexa sequencing data will soon be available for the 26 parental lines, making it possible to perform a unified NAM analysis on the entire population, potentially with gene-level QTL resolution.

We invite interested maize researchers to score their own phenotypes of interest in one or more of our annual public grow-outs of our NAM population.

Yes, you too can take advantage of all of the work we have put into creating the world's largest public QTL experiment! In each of the next three summers (2008, 2009 and 2010), we will hold a public grow-out of our entire NAM population, and you are invited to score your own trait(s) of interest in one of more of these plantings. This will allow you to fine-map the genes controlling your trait(s), using our public genotypic and sequencing data for this population. The phenotypic data you collect will be yours to do with as you please, with no strings attached!

We also have extensive experience in creating barcoding tools for phenotyping, and can provide advice on this.  The locations of the grow-outs and the contact info for each summer are provided below:

Additional Information

Our NAM genotypes and genetic map are available here.

If you want to grow NAM yourself, you can obtain seed for all of the lines from the Maize Genetics Cooperation Stock Center.

The NAM concept is explained and demonstrated via computer simulation in the following publication:
Yu J, Holland JB, McMullen MD, Buckler ES. 2008. Genetic design and statistical power of Nested Association Mapping. Genetics 178:539-551.   [pdf]

Also, for further explanation, see the Panzea FAQ items What are RILs?, How are the NAM RILs useful? and What is Nested Association Mapping (NAM)?.